Will Mayor Rob Ford’s struggles merit a plaque?

Toronto mayor’s troubles have piqued the world’s curiousity about Toronto

Artist Ai Weiwei's newly-installed Circle of Animals sculptures are all about, yet a woman pauses Tuesday to take a picture of the chunk of Berlin wall, marked by a plaque, at the foot of one of the Freedom Arches at Toronto City Hall.

You can read Toronto like a book, because words are scattered along our streets. They are found in abundance on plaques and other markers. Some tell a local story, others connect us to far away places, like our chunk of the Berlin Wall in Nathan Phillips Square.

For a brief period, Toronto’s Cold War connection was missing. Located on the Queen St. side of the middle Freedom Arch that spans the skating rink, it was moved during revitalization construction. But the slab is now back by the arch, with its plaque dedicated to the struggle for freedom.

There is no central bureau itemizing the hundreds of various and sundry plaque-like markers on our streets, so it’s difficult to say how many are out there, and no one is keeping track of some that go missing, though Heritage Toronto comes closest.

The arms-length city agency responsible for keeping Toronto’s history alive, Heritage Toronto has been actively installing new plaques that, unlike older, cast iron markers, now include great archival photos. You’ll find them around town, like at Spadina Ave. and Bloor St. where three plaques commemorate the fight against the Spadina Expressway. Back at City Hall, another explains that Nathan Phillips Square was the site of Toronto’s first Chinatown, and out along Eglinton East there is one marking Scarborough’s Golden Mile postwar development.

There are many other plaques around town, sometimes put up by private owners on their buildings, by local community and business organizations, or even other levels of government. Some, like the marker in Amsterdam Square at St. Clair and Avenue Road, recounting the day in 1974 that city’s mayor and Toronto’s then-mayor David Crombie twinned the two cities, are fun to find. Likewise, if someone finally figures out where Toronto’s first pizza joint opened, a plaque should mark the spot.

Even the posters people put up on poles are a kind of plaques, describing a part of neighbourhood life right now, whether it’s a yard sale or a lost cat. You can literally get a reading on a neighbourhood by looking at the poles.

Like mapmakers, those who control the plaques control history. For a few years during the 2000s the Missing Plaque Project (missingplaque.tao.ca) was started, marking locations without official plaques with pasted up posters, like the 1981 bathhouse raids and the 1992 Yonge Street Riot, with some sites later getting proper plaques of their own.

Today, Toronto writer Adam Bunch runs the Toronto Dreams Project, (torontodreamsproject.com) where he leaves fictional stories on postcards around town based on actual historical figures, blending fact and fiction.

Great cities live in our imaginations made up of real and fictional stories, yet Toronto has somehow not been able to occupy a permanent part of people’s brains the way other cities have, despite an abundance of stories here.

Until now, that is.

Everybody here and elsewhere is suddenly talking about Toronto thanks to the mayor. Like or loathe him, we’ve all had to field question from out of town relatives and friends asking what (insert expletive) is going on in Toronto? It has become a dark story — one participant, Anthony Smith, seen next to Ford in a widely-circulated picture, is dead.

A small positive is the mental space opened up by Mayor Ford in so many minds, here and elsewhere. It’s a chance to tell other Toronto stories. Toronto is occupying so many heads for the moment, let’s keep them filled with Toronto stories once this particular one passes.

Wander the streets with the Star’s Shawn Micallef on Twitter@shawnmicallefTwitter@shawnmicallefEND.

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